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Excruciating dissection of Nobody video clarifies little: DiManno

The descriptive vivisection of Adam Nobody’s body went on and on and on.

“He’s on his side, moving to get up.”

“They’re struggling to get his hands out.”

“I’m near his hip area. For a moment I saw his arm come up.”

“His left side buttock area is lifted higher off the ground.”

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“This is Mr. Nobody’s free leg, in a kicking motion.”

“He’s now on his stomach. This is where you can see Const. Donaldson bending Mr. Nobody’s leg.”

“Mr. Nobody’s hands look like they’re covering his face, his arm is at a 90-degree angle.”

Frame by frame, hour after hour, Const. Babak Andalib-Goortani provided play-by-play commentary delineating events as they were simultaneously shown on a screen in court Monday. Stitched together, the five separate pieces of overlapping civilian-shot footage total no more than four or five minutes. But this was the super-slo-mo version depicting the violent take-down arrest of Nobody during G20 clashes between police and protesters at Queen’s Park on June 26, 2010.

The famous Zapruder tape of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination has possibly not been dissected so thoroughly.

Except, if Andalib-Goortani and his defence lawyer, Harry Black, were limning that Zapruder film, Kennedy might have been at fault for not ducking the bullet.

As Nobody was at fault, Andalib-Goortani insisted, for not coming to heel when he was tackled to the ground and set upon by half-a-dozen officers that day.

Only Andalib-Goortani has been charged in relation to the incident. He’s pleaded not guilty to assault with a weapon — that weapon being his night stick — at the judge-alone trial.

The lawfulness of Nobody’s arrest is not under dispute, as stated in an agreed summation of facts, only whether excessive force was used.

On Monday morning, the defence opened its case with Andalib-Goortani, 33, called as the first witness. He was on the stand all day.

In three decades of covering trials, I have never seen such exhaustive parsing and autopsying of videotape evidence. A segment that lasted 16 seconds was stop-frame reviewed for close to an hour, although on that occasion it was during cross-examination by the Crown.

Nor have I ever before witnessed a cop sobbing in the witness stand at what appeared an innocuous juncture of testimony.

Andalib-Goortani had been recalling events prior to Nobody’s takedown when, with other members of his mobile team — regular officers, not the Public Order Unit — he had been working a traffic blockade in the area of Spadina and College St. The chatter on his police radio had grown louder as, he said, the growing crowd became more restless. Police had been told Black Bloc anarchists had infiltrated the gathering. Rocks and bottles were being thrown. “I saw a flare…”

At that point the witness broke down completely and a recess was called so he could compose himself.

Upon resumption of court 15 minutes later, Andalib-Goortani continued: “A lot of officers came on the radio, asking for help. They were saying they were being attacked. They were outnumbered. They were being hit.”

He began crying again. “An officer came on the radio. He was screaming. He said, he said, ‘1033, 1033, I need help!’

“There was nothing I could do.”

Another message squawked over the radio. “Unless you’re POU, you’re not to respond.”

The dispatcher was warning officers, said Andalib-Goortani, that anarchists were everywhere, armed with hammers and sticks, “smashing things,” tossing bags of excrement.

And then a chilling directive: “Don’t confront them. Just run away from them.”

These, presumably, were the Black Bloc anarchists who laid siege to downtown Toronto that awful night, turning over cars, breaking windows, torching a police cruiser. They were the rowdies left to riot at will by police — which infuriated the public. No satisfactory explanation has ever been given for why Toronto police backed off the miscreants while, over that weekend, arresting upwards of 1,000 civilians, most of whom had nothing to do with the mayhem.

There has been no evidence that Nobody was a member of the Black Bloc, though Black (the lawyer) accused him — when Nobody testified last week — of baiting cops earlier that afternoon.

Andalib-Goortani testified he didn’t see Nobody until his unit moved over towards the lawn in front of the Legislature. His team — which had received all of one day’s training in “crowd conflict situations’’ — fell in behind the Public Order Unit. A staff-sergeant told them they were now an arrest team. Andalib-Goortani responded: “I don’t know what that means. We’re not trained for that.’’

What it meant was the unit would dart out from behind the POU line to arrest individuals who were “pointed out to us,” snap on handcuffs and turn them over for processing.

Andalib-Goortani testified he heard someone yelling: “There he is! Get him! Get him!’’

The him was Nobody. Andalib-Goortani admitted he didn’t know why Nobody had been targeted for pursuit. But he saw one officer giving chase. “I saw the officer fall down on the ground. He tackled the individual.’’

It will be up to Justice Louise Botham to determine what the videotape actually shows. Chopped up into freeze-frames, the flow of events is more difficult to decipher than when the footage is played at normal speed.

“I saw this person get up. I thought he was trying to get away,’’ Andalib-Goortani testified. “Others are driving at him, bringing this guy to the ground, or at least trying to bring him to the ground.’’

An officer identified only as PC Donaldson grabs Nobody’s foot. “He’s got a lot of resistance coming from that foot,’’ said Andalib-Goortani as the video was played.

Andalib-Goortani — six feet tall, at that time about 260 pounds — then struck Nobody with his baton. “I applied one strike. I was aiming for large muscular mass (the thigh) … to apply the most sensation with the least amount of pain, to limit injury.’’

That strike allegedly had no impact. “I could see that Donaldson still had resistance. (Nobody) is kicking, he’s flailing with the other foot.’’

Andalib-Goortani then seized his baton with two hands and delivered three more “thrusts.”

“I made a conscious decision to apply a measured degree of force.’’

During the take-down, as the video does make clear, Nobody was also punched several times by other officers and somebody kneed him in the head.

The witness maintained that, throughout all of this, he was constantly assessing the situation. “The application of force I used was consistent with our training … the force I felt we had to use to let us get control of Mr. Nobody.’’

In his testimony last week, Nobody was adamant that he was not resisting arrest — another witness, who shot one of the video segment, said the same thing — and that he was squirming, while pinioned, to avoid the blows raining down on him.

That whole encounter lasted about 90 seconds before Nobody was cuffed and handed over to a brace of plainclothes officers.

In his cross-examination, Crown attorney Philip Perlmutter asked: “In your mind, is there a difference between struggling and resisting?’’

Andalib-Goortani: “That’s confusing me.”

The officer beneath Nobody actually crawled out within about five seconds.

“(Nobody) wanted to get off this police officer as much as the police officer wanted to get out from under him,’’ Perlmutter suggested.

But Andalib-Goortani stuck to his impression of what was happening. “This was a continuation of him running away.’’

Perlmutter: “But the two of them were trying to disentangle themselves. You just leapt to the conclusion that he was getting up and running away.’’

Andalib-Goortani: “My consistent belief was that he was resisting.’’

Perlmutter: “I’m going to suggest that you saw everything Mr. Nobody did through the same lens. You ran out there to arrest him and at no point did you disengage.’’

The prosecutor also elicited from the officer an admission that he was not wearing either his name tag or his badge number that afternoon.

Indeed, 91 cops would subsequently be docked a day’s pay for removing their name tags and badge numbers that weekend.

Andalib-Goortani was charged six months after the G20 debacle, only after civilian video had been provided to the special investigations unit. A photograph showing the then-unidentified officer was also published on the front page of the Star, visor raised, face clearly visible.

The officer said he was unaware of that photo and attempts to identify him because he’d been out of the country.

Andalib-Goortani rejected Perlmutter’s suggestion that he was angry, frustrated and “overwhelmed’’ by the chaos on that Saturday, which might explain the ferocity of his contribution to Nobody’s arrest.

“It was distasteful, what they were doing,’’ said the officer, of the violent elements in the crowd.

“I wasn’t angry. I believe I was helping to finish this arrest.’’

Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.

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